“Man is nothing else but what he makes of himself.”
With this single, seismic statement, the philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre threw down the gauntlet of the 20th century. He declared that we are born as nothing, a void, an “existence” without a pre-written script or a divine “essence.” We are terrifyingly, thrillingly free. Our entire identity, our purpose, our very meaning, is the sum of the choices we make.
For decades, this was a challenge wrestled with in cafes, lecture halls, and literature. But today? Where is this grand, anxious project of self-creation playing out most visibly? It’s not in the Latin Quarter of Paris. It’s on YouTube. It’s on TikTok. It’s in the relentless, 24/7 churn of the creator economy.
The internet promised a new frontier of Sartrean freedom—a space where anyone, with a camera and a thought, could define themselves from scratch and broadcast that self to the world. And yet, anyone who has spent time in that world has felt a creeping, unnamed anxiety. A sense of a hidden puppet master. We have the freedom to create anything, but we are haunted by a single, all-powerful question: “Yes, but what does the algorithm want?”
This is the central paradox of the modern creative life. Are creators authentically defining themselves in a bold act of self-creation? Or are they, in a desperate bid for survival, performing a carefully constructed “essence” dictated not by their soul, but by the cold, calculating demands of a machine? Let’s take a closer look, because the answer reveals a profound existential struggle at the heart of our digital lives.
The Sartrean Dilemma: Radical Freedom Meets Digital Reality
To understand the pressure facing a modern creator, we first have to understand the philosophical weight of the freedom they’ve been handed. It’s not just the freedom to choose a video topic; it’s the burden of creating a self out of thin air.
What Did Sartre Mean by “Existence Precedes Essence”?
Think of it this way. For most of history, we believed that a thing’s purpose—its essence—came before it was even made. A knife-maker knows the essence of a knife (to cut) before they forge the blade. For centuries, we applied this logic to ourselves: our essence (a soul, a destiny, a place in the social order) was given to us by God or by birthright, and our job was simply to live it out.
Sartre flipped this on its head. He argued there is no pre-defined human nature. We are simply born—we exist. Then, through our actions, our commitments, and our choices, we build our essence. You are the artist, and your life is the blank canvas. There is no instruction manual. It’s an exhilarating thought, isn’t it? But it comes with a terrifying catch.
The Heavy Burden of Absolute Responsibility
If you are the sole author of your life, who do you blame when it goes wrong? Who do you turn to for guidance? No one. According to Sartre, we are “condemned to be free.” We are responsible for everything we are, and that weight creates a profound sense of anxiety, or what the existentialists called dread.
Now, picture a new creator. They open a YouTube channel or an Instagram profile. What do they see? A blank page. Zero subscribers. Zero posts. It is the perfect digital manifestation of the Sartrean void. They face the absolute freedom to be anyone, to say anything. But with it comes the crushing dread of that responsibility. They, and they alone, must build an entire self from scratch for public consumption, a self they hope the world will validate. It’s no wonder they immediately start looking for a rulebook.
The Algorithm as the New “Essence”: Performing for the Platform
And here is where the 21st century throws a wrench in the works. Creators, paralyzed by the dread of absolute freedom, quickly discover that while there may be no divine rulebook, there is a digital one. It’s called the algorithm.
How Metrics and Feedback Loops Dictate Performance
The algorithm isn’t a person, of course. It’s something far more powerful: a silent, invisible, and ruthlessly efficient system of judgment. It doesn’t care about your authentic self or your artistic vision. It cares about one thing: data. Watch time, click-through rate, shares, comments. These metrics become a creator’s guide to reality, a substitute for the meaning they were supposed to create for themselves.
This creates a vicious feedback loop. A creator posts a video of them trying a silly dance, and it goes viral. They post a heartfelt video essay, and it gets a handful of views. What’s the lesson? The algorithm—the great arbiter of success—has declared that the creator’s “essence” is “silly dancer.”
To continue to succeed, they must perform this essence again and again. Their identity becomes a product on a digital shelf, refined and optimized based on market feedback. The creator is no longer a free subject creating their own meaning; they become an object, shaped by the desires of the platform. (The very thing Sartre warned us against!)
“Bad Faith” in the Age of Analytics
Sartre had a term for this kind of self-deception: “bad faith.” Bad faith is when we lie to ourselves to escape the anxiety of our freedom. It’s when we pretend we are objects without choice.
The classic example is a waiter who performs “waiter-ness” so perfectly—his movements a little too precise, his voice a little too solicitous—that he seems more like a robot than a person. He is hiding from his own freedom by pretending he is nothing more than his role as a waiter.
Does this sound familiar? It’s the creator who says, “I have to do these reaction videos; it’s the only thing the algorithm boosts.” Or, “I have to maintain this bubbly, positive persona; it’s my brand.” They are acting in bad faith. They are choosing to believe they have no choice, because acknowledging their freedom—the freedom to make the heartfelt video essay even if it fails—is too terrifying to confront. They are fleeing from their own responsibility into the comforting prison of their analytics dashboard.
The Psychological Cost: Algorithmic Anxiety and the Fractured Self
This constant performance, this state of technological bad faith, isn’t just a philosophical problem. It has profound and painful psychological consequences. The algorithmic anxiety it produces is at the root of the creator economy’s burnout epidemic.
The Quantified Self and the Crisis of Authenticity
What happens when your sense of self is outsourced to a set of metrics? You begin to see yourself as a number. Your worth is no longer intrinsic; it’s your subscriber count. Your ideas are not valued for their truth, but for their engagement potential.
This creates a painful split between the creator’s inner, authentic self and the public-facing, performed self. They become a walking, talking A/B test. This constant self-surveillance and optimization is exhausting. The anxiety comes from the fear that the audience will see the cracks in the facade, or worse, that the facade will completely swallow the real person underneath. It’s like living in a hall of mirrors where every reflection is just a different data point, and you can no longer remember what the original object looked like.
Is Creator Burnout an Existential Condition?
We often talk about creator burnout in terms of hustle culture and impossible workloads. That’s certainly part of it. But what if the exhaustion runs deeper than just a packed schedule?
The burnout so many creators experience is arguably an existential condition. It is the profound spiritual and psychological fatigue that comes from the inauthentic performance of a self you did not freely choose. It’s the soul’s rebellion against being treated as an object. It’s the human spirit growing tired of wearing a mask designed by a machine.
The ultimate anxiety is not just “Will this video do well?” but a far more terrifying question: “If I stop performing the self the algorithm wants, will there be anything left of me at all?”
The Sum of It
The creator economy sold a dream of ultimate freedom—the Sartrean promise of self-creation on a global stage. But it delivered this promise inside a cage—an invisible, algorithmic structure that subtly coerces its subjects into performing a pre-approved essence for likes and shares. The great challenge for the modern creator, and indeed for all of us living our lives online, is to recognize the bars of this cage. It is only then that we can begin the truly terrifying, truly freeing work of choosing who we are, not for the algorithm, but for ourselves.
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